COLUMN RIGHT : Rescue the Hostages and Iraq Will Fall : Without his embassy captives, Hussein will have no cards left to play.

The crux of the Iraq-Kuwait crisis is Saddam Hussein’s desperate move of taking Americans and other foreigners as hostages. President George Bush has firmly insisted not only that Kuwait be liberated from Iraq’s occupation but also that hostages be freed as a matter of moral principle and international legality. The President is right.

The repercussions from Iraq’s abrupt invasion and military occupation of Kuwait have turned the world upside down. As time goes by the danger of the necessity of war against Iraqi military forces raises anxiety, but the issue must be faced. Iraq’s uncivilized treatment of the foreign residents in both Iraq and Kuwait makes military hostilities all the more likely.

With the deployment of substantial U.S. military forces in the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, Saddam Hussein is facing the time of truth. The international consortium is trying to force him to withdraw from Kuwait forthwith and accept a dramatic, humiliating, political retreat. If the United States holds firm and backs Iraq into a corner, Hussein may soon try to play more intensively than he has so far the only card he has remaining in his hands--the exploitation of American hostages.

Given Hussein’s own conspiratorial criminal background, he is very likely also to unleash attacks against Americans and American installations anywhere in the world.

Dictators never should get compensation for discontinuing actions that no civilized leaders would ever contemplate in the first place. If Iraq is allowed to buy much more time for further political maneuver by the hostages ploy, the whole American effort to rescue the Mideast may begin to unravel.

What the United States must do within the next 45 days is to seize the moral high ground by announcing an operation to rescue the Americans in the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait with the minimum use of force and minimum loss of life.

* U.S. assault teams of the special-operations forces should be quickly deployed into Kuwait to rescue the American Embassy personnel held hostage; in effect, the forces will be acting on a peacekeeping mission and seeking no military confrontation.

* The assault teams should be equipped to use available non-lethal technology, such as stun guns and infrasonic devices to disorient or disable, without killing, the Iraqi troops holding the hostages. Their rescue attempt will indicate their aim is peace, not war.

* A much larger unit of American troops with highly lethal weapons and air cover will back up the assault teams.

* If the non-lethal rescue effort of the assault teams escalates because of Iraq’s intransigence, the inexorable consequences will be that American forces will neutralize any and all threatening Iraqi military forces, primarily by air and missile attack but also by tank and artillery gunfire insofar as necessary.

After the American rescue effort is mounted, Hussein will have no more maneuver room. He may try to make a face-saving deal, or he may be replaced by his own cohorts who do not want to see their power destroyed. If, however, the Iraqi regime decides to attack American forces with lethal weapons, the result will be that its army will be wiped out. The soldiers may wisely desert the battlefield.

The rescue effort will either bring military hostilities by Hussein’s own decision or the beginning of the liberation of Kuwait.